Welcome to my living textbook on new media writing!

Tag: Community

Academic scholars have drawn from various influences to understand the role selection and arrangement play in new media writing, such as Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box, Walter Benjamin’s Flaneur, and William Burrough’s cut up method. Geoffrey Sirc uses Duchamp’s Green Box collection of personal notes as inspiration to imagine “a compelling medium and genre with which to re-arrange textual materials–both original and appropriated– in order to have those materials speak the student’s own voice and concerns, allowing them to come up with something obscure, perhaps, yet promising illumination” (“Box Logic” 113). However, such things no longer need to be imagined. The idea of choosing and placing a variety of materials based on personal association is one of the most common uses of sites like Tumblr and Pinterest. The only difference is, unlike Duchamp’s box, these repositories are linked to a network of other boxes. How many high school seniors have a Pinterest board labeled “College,” where all their future goals, visions, and desires are stored, from possible majors to dorm room layouts? Like Benjamin’s vision of the modern flaneur, individuals online leisurely stroll through Pinterest boards and Tumblr and Twitter feeds that beacon like storefront windows. However, unlike the modern flaneur, there is often little reflection on what these collected cultural artifacts say or mean.

So what do we do with these fragmented materials? Jeff Rice draws from Burrough’s use of the cut up method to demonstrate how writers can appropriate material and use it in their own writing. Burrough’s work brings both a commentary on the oppressiveness of copyright and an approach to using juxtapositions and collections as a mode of invention:

It is experimental in the sense of being something to do. Right here write now. Not something to talk and argue about.Greek philosophers assumed logically that an object twice as heavy as another object would fall twice as fast. It did not occur to them to push the two objects off the table and see how they fall. Cut the words and see how they fall. Shakespeare Rimbaud live in their words. Cut the word lines and you will hear their voices. (Burroughs)

Within Burrough’s cut-up method, individuals are writing with a sense of play in order to discover. They are learning through the experience of cutting up and assembling. Too often students think of learning as something that happens prior to writing. Using cut up and collecting methods to invent and understanding how juxtapositions or a collection of texts create meaning is another specific literacy skill needed to navigate and create rhetorically in new media ecologies.

Fair Use: The Modern Day Cut Up Method

The mastery of remix is using clipped pieces to create a different meaning than they had in their original form. The Daily Show does this when they cut up and remix news clips. The cut up and juxtaposition of clips tells a different story than the ones originally aired in newscasts. Usually it is to show the ineptitude of a news station, the hypocrisy of a politician, or the illogical viewpoint of a special interest group. This is why it is considered a transformative use.

Often when we add music to videos we are not thinking of a transformative use. We put romantic ballads over wedding videos and sad songs over photo montage tributes. Now, what if you had a wedding video juxtaposed with the song Papa Roach “Scars”? The song and the wedding video would mean something different together than they would apart. This is what a good remix does.

In my own example, I juxtapose clips of the TV show Community with videos from Delta College’s marketing department. I used the program WeVideo, which I loved until they began charging to upload videos to Youtube. So I won’t be doing my fine tuning in WeVideo, but starting again in Adobe Premiere. I wanted to create a video where I say nothing and let the edits tell the story. Here is the rough cut: https://www.wevideo.com/hub/#media/ci/257660886

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